Alibaba's upcoming IPO has thrown the spotlight on Chinese tech companies. No company is an exact equivalent of its US counterpart and matching them is a messy affair, but here is a broad outline.

:: Alibaba

Equivalent: Amazon/eBay

Value: Up to £117bn (pending IPO)

The e-commerce giant of China is closest to a mix of Amazon and eBay. It doesn't sell goods directly like Amazon, but acts as a bazaar, both for business-to-business and business-to-consumer.

Video:Alibaba: 5 Things You Didn't Know

Total transactions through the site in 2013 totalled £146bn and Alibaba takes a 3% cut.

It has also developed a payment system much like PayPal.

:: Tencent

Equivalent: Facebook

Value: £88bn

Tencent is a lot like Facebook: a social network with a heavy presence in mobile messaging, gaming and commerce.

Its WeChat app is a Whatsapp equivalent and hugely popular in China.

But Tencent is monetising the app much better: users can play games, book taxis and film tickets - even manage their investments - all within the app.

:: Sina Corporation

Equivalent: Twitter/Yahoo

Value: £1.7bn

Sina Corp is all about online publishing, whether through its microblogging service Weibo, which recently had an underperforming IPO in the US and is a service much like Twitter, itself blocked in China, or its infotainment portal in the mould of Yahoo and its affiliated sites.

:: Baidu

Equivalent: Google

Value: £33bn

Baidu is China's most popular search engine and the fifth most popular website in the world, according to the Alexa internet rankings.

Like Google, it also now owns a YouTube equivalent, iQiyi. It's less keen on self-driving cars and Wi-Fi balloons though.

:: Youku Tudou

Equivalent: YouTube

Value: £2.1bn

Youku Tudou now even shares its initials with YouTube: Youku and Tudou were two separate sites that merged in 2012.

Together they are China's biggest video site.

Alibaba led a $1.2 billion investment in the site recently to hold off the threat from Baidu.

:: Xiaomi

Equivalent: Apple

Value: £5.9bn (at last fundraising round in August 2013)

Xiaomi was only founded in 2010. It released its first smartphone a year later and has kept rolling them out.

It poached Hugo Barra from Google as its global vice president and has started expanding out of China, setting a world record for the most expensive domain name when the company spent $2.1m on mi.com.

Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple, has said the company's phones are "excellent".